Three days.
That's how long it took me to stop flinching at my own reflection.
Not because the face was unfamiliar — I had seen John Reese's face enough times on a screen to recognize the geometry of it. No. What unsettled me wasn't the face itself. It was the way it moved when I hadn't told it to.
A micro-expression suppressed before it could form. Hands adjusting grip on nothing, out of habit, out of muscle memory that wasn't mine and yet operated through my fingers like I'd been given a car I didn't know how to drive and the car kept correcting the wheel.
You're losing ground, some part of me noted.
Not with alarm. Just… notation. The way you mark a weather change. I kept walking. But I thought it shouldn't continue like this, feeling my mind fragmated and working like two different persons was agonising, as I suspected, but the situation didn't allow me to rest so I should try to solve it later.
--
The wound in my left arm had stopped bleeding somewhere around the second day. I'd packed it with cloth torn from a jacket I'd found near the blast perimeter — and the cold had done the rest. It would infect and while a part of me still thought I should do something. That was a future problem, and I had learned very quickly that John Reese's mind had a specific and ruthless way of filing future problems: acknowledge, categorize, set aside. Do not carry them into the present moment. The present moment had enough weight, and between my two minds in this situation where the life I lived was useless I clung to anything related to john, if I was to become a different person be it. A nomal person may have felt some guilt or despair but I was alrready broken, and in some way it was surely something to be gratefull.
The landscape around here was the kind of emptiness that felt deliberate. Not natural emptiness — not wilderness, not silence that had always been there — but emptiness that had been made. Streets that had been built and then abandoned before anyone moved in. Buildings standing complete and hollow, windows dark, concrete already beginning to gray at the edges. A city that existed on paper and in satellite imagery and almost nowhere else.
A Ghost city reminding me of Picher (America) in some term just on a different scale. Appropriate comparaison under the circumstances I suppose.
I moved through it without lights. John Reese's body knew how to do this — tactically, the mechanics of staying low, reading shadow and listening for footsteps against pavement.
--
Flashback 2 days ago
The building sat four kilometers east of the missile site, past a dry riverbed that didn't appear on any civilian map and probably didn't appear on most military ones either. Soviet-era construction, built for a purpose that had outlived its context and left only the shell behind. Cracked concrete. Windows replaced with plastic sheeting that breathed faintly in the wind. A water tower leaning west like it had somewhere else to be.
I spent four minutes at the treeline watching it.
No light. No exhaust vapor. No boot prints in the frost that didn't belong to small animals. The plastic sheeting moved at the same rhythm as the wind, not against it — which ruled out bodies on the other side pressing close to listen.
Clean, probably. Clean enough.
The CIA didn't build obvious caches. That was the first thing John Reese's memory had offered me when I'd started reconstructing the laptop's location — not a specific image, not a remembered address, but a principle. You don't hide something valuable by making it look hidden. You hide it by making it look like nothing.
The water filtration panel on the eastern wall opened too smoothly for a building this derelict. The hollow behind it smelled of foam dampening material and dry air kept deliberately stable. And inside—
A laptop. Standard-issue CIA field unit. Externally unremarkable. The kind of object you could set on a coffee table and no one would look twice.
I looked at it for a long moment.
This was the thing. The specific, physical, unremarkable thing that Decima Technologies would spend years hunting. The thing that, in the original timeline, they eventually found — and built Samaritan from. A machine that saw everything, trusted no one, and decided for itself which humans were acceptable losses.
Thousands of deaths. Traced back to this.
To a hollow in a wall. In a city that didn't exist. In a country that would never officially acknowledge what had happened here.
John Wattergate found that funny, in the way that things are funny when they are also unbearable.
John Reese didn't find it funny. But he understood the weight of small objects. He had carried enough of them.
I picked it up.
---
The plan assembled itself over the following hour the way my brain worked now — not from a single mind working through options sequentially, but from two perspectives running parallel, checking each other's blind spots without being asked.
John Wattergate knew the shape of what was coming. The broad strokes. The deaths that were already written if nothing changed. Jessica Arndt had eight months. Harold Finch was already years deep into building something that would either save the world or end it, depending on which episode you were watching. Decima's people were already in motion, already narrowing the radius around this area, already working from the assumption that the missile had done its job.
John Reese knew the texture of the present. The specific weight of operational reality — what a seventy-two-hour extraction window actually felt like, what it cost to a body that was already compromised, what the difference was between a risk that could be absorbed and one that would simply kill you quietly and without drama in a ditch outside a city that didn't exist.
Between them, something like a plan emerged.
Not elegant. Elegant required resources I didn't have — support network, clean documentation, a handler who hadn't just tried to kill me. What I had was a bullet wound, a dead man's skillset, a laptop three intelligence organizations would burn assets to recover, and the singular advantage of knowing which parts of this story were already written.
Decima would come. Seventy-two hours, give or take, before this area became operationally untenable. Getting out of China without documentation, with a compromised arm and no extraction team, was the kind of problem that had no clean solution — only a series of bad options ranked by survivability.
In the show, John Reese had survived China for nearly a year.
He hadn't done it by running in a straight line.
Don't move like a fugitive, the colder voice said — his voice, or mine now, I had genuinely stopped being able to tell. Move like someone who belongs here. Fugitives get caught. Ghosts don't.
I turned the laptop over in my hands once. Thought about what it contained. Thought about what it would become if I simply walked away with it, found a border crossing, disappeared into the world with future knowledge and a dead man's face.
Samaritan wouldn't be built. That chain of events would be severed cleanly, here, tonight, by one decision.
But chains didn't sever cleanly. They transferred weight.
If Decima didn't get the laptop, they'd find another path. They had resources, patience, and a philosophy that didn't require any single point of leverage to function. And without Samaritan as the visible threat, Harold might never fully understand what he'd created — might never build the safeguards, might never find Reese, might never assemble the team that had, in the end, actually mattered.
But it probably didn't matter you couldn't cut one thread without watching three others unravel after all.
I knew that. John Wattergate, who had spent thirty years reading about unintended consequences in history books and watching them play out in fiction, knew that perhaps better than anyone.
So. Not destruction. Not yet.
Control, the other voice agreed. You don't neutralize a weapon by destroying it. You neutralize it by being the one who decides where it points.
I wrapped the laptop in the foam dampening material, secured it against my body, and walked back out into the cold.
Somewhere to the west, Decima's people were moving through darkness that looked just like mine.
I had a head start measured in hours.
I intended to use every minute of it.
Flashback end